The mobile-phone maker receives a $1.35 billion grant to work on
development of the 2D wonder-material that is stronger, lighter, and
thinner than anything else on Earth.

A model of a sheet of graphene.

(Credit:
Swedish Academy of Sciences)

Forget diamonds, graphene is now the world's hardest material. And
all sorts of developers most likely want to get their hands on it.

Nokia looks to be ahead of the game in this graphene race. The Finnish
mobile-phone maker announced today that it was one of the recipients of a
$1.35 billion grant from the European Union to do research and
development on the supermaterial over the next 10 years.

"Nokia
is proud to be involved with this project, and we have deep roots in the
field -- we first started working with graphene already in 2006,"
Nokia's CTO Henry Tirri said in a statement.
"Since then, we have come to identify multiple areas where this
material can be applied in modern computing environments. We've done
some very promising work so far, but I believe the greatest innovations
have yet to be discovered."